Good day Steemians!
I was reading this awesome article today on flipboard about how roving vans in japan are providing banking and local food, it lit a fire under my backside to tell you about my dream project that I've been sitting on for the last five years, with the recent changes in hf19 and my general rebound into a postive mindset i thought it could not do any harm to share you my vision with you.
I've given myself the space of 250 posts to achieve this goal so it makes a clear record of the process - read this, Roving vans in Japan provide mobile banking, food from home for Brazilian community| Reuters for the backstory why i got fired up again because i realised where the crossover could be!
It's funny how a simple flipboard post can inspire me to circle back around and look at something again, I saw a a great post this morning about a mobile banks and local food fleet of vans that criss cross japan servicing a requirement and need for a large number of people that are spread out. Some of the takeaways from this blogpost however really resonated with me and made me think about maybe bringing this concept up to the community of steemians.
I've been looking to setup a creative retreat in Spain or Bulgaria for the last three or four years but I've been falling at the first hurdle. Transportation. I've got a unique situation in that i need to be back in the country at least every seven days so i need a series of methods to be able to get into Europe (Spain or Bulgaria) quickly and easily, either driving and getting their in a few days or as a method of transport between the ferry and the airports.
My absolute perfect solution to getting transport between the airports or ferry ports would be to have transport both sides to lower the costs, a van in both places but in the short term,a good van, with good insurance and European breakdown cover would work, once in Europe the van could stay in there and i can commute back and forth using quick cost effective plane flights.
The reason i have to come back every week is that i have my daughter at weekends, i think it's highly possible however to travel on a Sunday, work monday to Thursday and travel Thursday night to Friday early afternoon, that gives me a good twelve hours or more to get myself sorted and gives me commuting time to make this happen. I'd probably not do it every week to keep costs down and I'd try and factor in trips as vacations/holidays with my daughter into the equation so we can be over in 10 day blocks as well.
So it got me thinking why not optimize the need i have and what i can do for amplifying the community here at steemit? How can i do both, get access to transportation to make the dream happen and also have a mobile promotional steemit van in the process. It makes sense to combine the two together. Of course, i don't expect you to be down with this but i want to put this out into the steemit universe because it's something i want to do.
the creative retreat
Let's be honest here, we have a huge amount of digital worker, working in the city, on that daily commute grind that are working crazy hours and are quite literally mentally exhausted from pounding the city pavements. They want a break, they want experiences, they want the ease of airbnb bookings and they want to get away and relax. My ideal for the creative retreat came about after experimentation and a love for shipping containers.
I was lucky to get a friend of mine a few years back design me some shipping containers up in a 3D program with my smart car parked inside at the end, i was working with what i had, and trying to come up with a way to securely put my car inside as i travelled back and forth, the idea was to have a hire car from the airport to the shipping container and use the smart locally while i was there. I was quite surprised how little space my tiny smart actually took up, this is fairly too scale and it's an easy fit in a 40ft shipping container.
Shipping containers themselves are fairly accessible and cheap to purchase, the actual work to make them liveable take a bit of time and money, skill and sheer diy skills, you can pick up a shipping container for around £2000 for a decent one from eBay, it's gonna cost you another £400-850 to have to have it bought to you via a truck driver from a location to a place in the uk or Europe pricing respectively above.
what will the steemit creative retreat comprise of?
Our intention is for the location to be a relative secret, no geo posting allowed (for safety and security of our clients and also to feed into the offgrid aspect of the location) and we might go as far as to restrict cellular comms with blocks in some way. Not sure on that yet, but we think a creative retreat to unwind and recharge should probably come with limited connectivity options.
Starting with the first container it would be a place to crash, hang out, talk, work on creative projects on pen and paper and whiteboards, use recording equipment to get video and audio media together, thoughts together, brainstorming and the initial detox from the madness of working in a creative environment, let's call it the chill down period, we would probably do this for 24/48hrs of arriving and it would be sent to you when you got back to where you came from so you can use this to kickstart your blogging or projects when you get back from the retreat.
For the rest of the week (we would probably do it in week long retreats) we would probably put together a list of activities that you can do throughout the day that are really about becoming centred as a create person - from yoga to meditation, to days out hiking and photo walks to crafty pursuits and making, working as a team to make sure that everyone takes a turn cooking for the rest of the group and leaving space to have the flexibility just to be present.
transport to and from the retreat with the steemit van!
So then, it makes sense for the transportation, it's got that triple threat win, it gives me transport to enable me and dayle to look for land for the creative retreat, an ability to promote the community between points of steemit and transport to pick up visitors back and forth between the retreat and a central pickup location -- at this stage it makes sense for you to say fly into Faro in Portugal or Sofia in Bulgaria, each is only a few hours (roughly) between where we want the creative retreat locations to be.
it's a lot of work, but I'm up to the challenge
It's going to take a lot of work, a lot of logistics, planning, sharing the struggles and celebrating the wins. I've wanted a secondary base camp where i can flex my creative muscles without being restricted by the usual issues when launching creative projects - property and landlord politics, local entrenched backward thinking and red tape positioning politics. I've seen it and experience it all working in a bit city, being told i had to make a DEAL was the finally straw and forced me to spend my creative pursuits elsewhere.
I've lived in England all my life and right now it's feels the worst like it's ever been, the majority of the people at street level are not my people, they don't embrace change instead prefer to maintain a sheep like state of apathy in ideals and considerations of others, i don't see how this country will be able to deliver on it's hollow promises. I'm sick of the spin and the distraction economy of the same old promises that account to nothing for little old me.
i have to consider my daughters future
Where will be considered safe during the rise of the anti social media brigade, what jobs and skills will she need to develop and how will we survive with a every changing rapidly moving environment around us with a planet that keeps getting hotter, much needed eco systems failing around us and the requirement for us to be multi faceted in dealing with our survival in our lives.
We are not all going to make it, that's a fact. It's like the old saying 'it's a survival of the fittest' - i believe that could not be more true today as the redefinition of society as a whole is rapidly changing from banking and finance to the open and transparent ledgers of the effects of blockchain.
optimising and adaptation
I live for optimising time and i love to problem solve to adapt to the ever shifting issues we have around us. I'm not prepared to sit and wait for my time to come where i get anxious and fearful to travel, i want to die living instead of existing in a high chair watching re-runs of a pseudo idea of life curated by other people. I want to make my own journey and that involves meeting, greeting, sharing, inspiring and feeling connected on an emotive level with my fellow human beings, i can't do that sitting in my comfort zone.
it's going to happen either way
Of course i don't expect the community to be as excited about this as me, it's my passion, it's my internal gps that is driving this, you can only get onboard so much, this might just be another post that flies by, that's fine, at least i got my intention out there into the universe. This is a project that i think about morning, noon and night, every time i see a van with solar panels or some digital nomad in transition by shooting a video clip of them taking off at an airport on Instagram stories.
We do this quick or we can do it slow, so far it's been five years slow simply because i needed time to mentally heal, to check myself, to double check the intention and outcomes, was it vanity or was it really something my soul wanted to do, I'm driven by my instincts and take them really seriously, i have to triple check. During this time my income has obviously taken a hit, my focus and ability to do a manual labour job bought me money but at the expense of my creativity, my lack of job bought in little resources but my creative has gone to the moon - now I'm in a sense of balance, i can see the wood for the trees and the hf19 and the steemit community as a whole as been a main component of that.
the dayle and phil equation
In early 2016 i sprained my wrist roller skating, i was at the caravan with one arm out of action, i was miserable, i was lonely, i felt stupid and was going slowly down hill in a dark place, i was drinking and smoking and was in a pit of self destruction. I started going on video chat rooms just to connect with other people to talk part in conversations. I just wanted to talk, i felt trapped and isolated by my circumstances. I knew with all the connectivity i had i just could'nt go down like that. I had to connection, i just had too.
That's where i met dayle, we hit it off straight away, we messaged and communicated outside of video chat and we had a few seriously life changing universal events that made us consider what we were both doing with our lives, we both were in relationships at the time but we had a serious of events that would change both of our trajectories at the same time. Just imagine us as the characters in the adjustment bureau and you pretty much get where we are in all of this so far.
I live in England and dayle lives in the states, we have issues with the freedom of movement for periods of time, we have issues with travel costs, we have living costs like everyone else, we have all the usual every day challenges you have, we are desperate to be together and we talk every single day, multiple times a day via text or video chat and we are grinding our creative bones each day to keep the wolves at the door and build up our digital survival networks.
Dayle has already spent a maximum of six months here in the uk with me on one stay and it's been six months since then. It's time for another six month trip but we need another location to be, where i am right now won't work for another trip of the same length, the place I'm staying knows me and trusts me, they don't know dayle and to them i understand it's another person around, it's also time to make the jump to this life direction or it will never happen, it's no use having the idea if it's going to just be a virtual pipe dream.
MY ACTIONS LIST MOVING FORWARD
I've put together the basics of the project below including some of the day to day operations of the van when we are not running the retreats, it's going to take some time and hard work and some help front he community to get the land and the retreat up and running so in between that it makes sense to build the audience to help us enhance the project. It's a no brainer!
Transport between locations, audience development on the road, application for steemit, the community and the projects that it's enabling to do. I truely believe it could be a new model for initiatives like Erasmus to embrace as well and even they invested into steem in terms of European funds going into the project via steemit adoption this could be a game changer.
costings that we will have to make for the steemit van
these are the first areas i really need to get costed but i can't do that until i have the physical van, i'm guessing that i need to invest probably at least in the first year about £25/30k to get this off the ground, of course that means a lot of long days, long hours and determination and effort. if you really want something you have to push right?
- purchase a suitable van motor home (around £10k GBP)
- van wrap and steemit design (setup dedicated steem account)
- european insurance and break down cover (costings)
- fuel projections for locations across europe (3 month window)
- food solid reserves for six months of time ahead (so we can be always executing)
- solar panel and battery setup to make as off grid as possible (will invest ourselves)
- marketing, promotion materials, pull up banners (part of the fundraising)
- LPG conversion for low cost alternate full (increased range) (would be a nice to have)
operations possible for the steemit mobile roadshow component while building towards the retreat. ..
trust me when i say this, me and dayle have bounced back ideas about what we could do on a daily basis to really amplify and bring in our own income. we don't expect to sit around in the van, we want to be the mobility component of promoting this steem blockchain and at the same time pour in our passions, food and coffee are two of thoses. imagine for a moment the film 'chef' and you get a rough idea of what kind of powerhouse would be inside this van. . .
so far, here are a few things we have considered. ..
- mobile coffee making (dayle really want's to do this)
- Breakfast burritos (i really want to do this, ultra cheap coworking food)
- Internet access with chairs, pop up laser cut sustainably made tables laser cut onboard, eventually we can make these on the go getting supplies from local sustainable forests
- Steemit to cash conversions to local currency to a certain limit, onboard secure safe to a certain limit of daily cash, maybe local currency offer to spend on setting up a steem account as an introduction into steemit.
- Use Instagram or similar to geo location check in like the film 'chef' to tell people where we are at, use popular area or just pop up
- Promote steemit using flyers, gifts and pull-up advertising (road shows)
- Onboard integrated laser cutter for making custom pieces on the road as an income stream to cover fuel and food and good content to post out live.
- ability for people in the area to book a night to crash in the steemit van in your area, think a mini airbnb exclusively for steemians.
- 'A steemian in need, is a van with steem' - respond to needing a place to crash for the evening for steemian nomads on the go and in the area.
- Mobile studio setup to record little interviews with average people on the street about what they think about steem, local steemians to the area visit the van and do an interview to see van they invested in.
so what do you think?
I realise it may have overloaded you and your probably reeling from reading so much in a steemit post but it was literally causing me anxiety keeping the scope of the project just in my head with resources fragmented, at least here i feel i can spread the information out, get feedback, and give you more of a background of what I'm working towards each and every day at a micro level, every bit of work i do and every bit of steem i earn goes a little towards the realisation of a project of this magnitude.